レビュー要約

• 詩的で複雑な語りと心理的な深さを高く評価する声がある一方、断片的で迷路のような構成を読みづらいと感じる読者もいる。

レビュー

• 文の力がすさまじい

  Kindle版を購入。 これはスペキュラティブフィクションにくくっていいのか？という議論がよくなされる作品ですが、私はくくっていいんじゃないかと。何か超常現象とかが結局起きたのか、と問われれば答えは否でしょうが、もう、主人公が怖すぎてもはやホラーじゃないかと。 私は普段本を読んでいてもその文体等に影響を受けることが少ないのですが（自分のアウトプットするものがその文体に似てしまうようなことが少ない、という意味で）この作品はなんというか……読んでいる間は何も書きたくなかったです。吐き出すものがどうなるか恐ろしくて。そのぐらいの力強さで、平たく言ってしまえば精神異常者が、その目に映る異常な世界について語ります。怖くないわけがないです。 だからと言って支離滅裂だったり、意味が分からない話になっていたりするわけではないです。読み終わってしばらくぼーっとしてました。ここまで小説にhauntされた、と感じたのはもしかしたらこれが初めてだったかも。 ただし、いわゆるpage-turnerとは少し違うので、好き嫌いは分かれるかもしれませんね。

• Genial

  Lo estoy leyendo actualmente y estoy enganchado a él. Todavía no llevo 100 páginas pero ya puedo decir que es un buen libro. En cuanto al envío, estuvo correcto, como siempre.

• The Drowning Girl - Scheitern auf hohem Niveau

  Heidi Julavits THE VANISHERS; Peter Straubs IN THE NIGHT ROOM; und jetzt Caitlin Kiernans THE DROWNING GIRL: ambitioniert erzählte Romane, die die Grenzen zwischen Genre- und E-Literatur aufheben, aber für meinen Lesergeschmack dabei scheitern; Leider scheitern, und ich bedauere das umso mehr, als alle diese Romane mich zunächst wirklich beeindruckt und begeistert haben. Die Fallhöhe von DROWNING GIRL ist besonders hoch, da ich auf den ersten 100 Seiten überzeugt war, einen der außergewöhnlichsten Romane in der Hand zu halten, die ich dieses Jahr bisher gelesen hatte. Ich liebe unzuverlässige und kautzige Erzähler/innen, und India Morgan Phelps ist eine außergewöhnliche Protagonistin, schizophren, lesbisch, unangepaßt und auf eigenwillige Weise doch liebenswert. Eine genaue Vorstellung der Geschichte, die Imp erzählen will, habe ich bis Seite 170 - und hier habe ich das Buch nun aus der Hand gelegt - allerdings nicht entwickelt. Ich bin kein über die Maßen ungeduldiger Leser und lese Bücher nicht nur des Inhalts, sondern auch der Form und der Sprache wegen. Aber in DROWNING GIRL stimmt für mich die Mischung nicht, und am Ende hat mich der Roman einfach nur noch frustriert. Ich ägere mich grundsätzlich über all die vielen grauenhaft schlecht geschriebenen Horrorromane und suche nach den anspruchsvollen Vertretern dieses Genres. Und dann holt mich der Zweifel ein, ob bestimmte Schreibformen mit bestimmten Genres vereinbar sind. Imp erzählt eine Geschichte, die verschiedene Anfänge hat und verschiedene Verläufe zu nehmen scheint: "Two stories that are true, when only one can be factual." Dass überhaupt zwei Varianten einer Geschichte denselben Anspruch auf Wahrhaftigkeit erheben können, erklärt die Erzählerin mit der physikalischen Analogie der verschiedenen Eigenschaften von Teilchen und Wellen. Imp legt auf Sprachgenauigkeit und zumindest subjektive Richtigkeit höchsten Wert, und wenn sie spricht von einer "language that I'm having to invent", um ihre Geschichte adäquat zu erzählen, fällt mir sofort Kafka ein, dessen Zweifel sich um das Wort reihen. Und so sind die ersten 50 Seiten immer wieder gefüllt mit Betrachtungen darüber, wie und ob sie die Geschichte erzählen kann, eine Problematik, auf die sie auch später oft zurückkommt. Sie (und damit natürlich auch die Autorin Kiernan) ist sehr belesen, so dass Zitate und Anspielungen aus der Literatur und der Kulturgeschichte breiten Raum einnehmen, dabei das Erzähltempo aber zusätzlich drosseln. "Last night, I lay awake, thinking about what I've been writing, how there's a story here, but how I've taken very little care to fashion a coherent narrative." - Dieser Befund von Imp ist zutreffend und - leider - auf die Dauer enttäuschend. Und wenn ich ihr zunächst nachsehen kann, mit welcher Umständlichkeit sie ihre Geschichte erzählt, ist das übertriebene Hinauszögern schließlich nicht mehr lustvoll, sondern frustrierend. Imp ist ein erzählerisches Wagnis, als Person genauso wie für Autor und Leser. Ich bewundere Kiernan, dass sie dieses Wagnis eingegangen ist und bin fast ein wenig von mir selbst enttäuscht, dass ich nun das Buch halbgelesen weglege. Aber auch das muss man lernen, dass nicht alle Schuld bei einem selbst liegt. Drei Sterne habe ich vergeben, weil bei den Amazon-Kundenrezensionen diese manchmal nicht hilfreiche Form der Bewertung zwanghaft vorgegeben ist. THE DROWNING GIRL ist ein höchst ungewöhnlicher und anspruchsvoller Roman und es allemal Wert, sich auf ihn einzulassen.

• Mind blowing

  Absolutely mind blown by this book. Ok first off it did drag for me as this was a new writing style for me. But as I got further along and not skim reading like I'm used to it got better and better. Caitlin's Lovecraftian writing style is just mind blowing. I will definitely be reading more from her!!! If your looking for something alittle different then check out her work.

• About Drowning and Learning to Swim

  The Drowning Girl opens: "'I'm going to write a ghost story now,' she typed. 'A ghost story with a mermaid and a wolf,' she also typed. I also typed." (p. 1) There are, indeed, ghosts in the pages that follow those fantastic opening lines. As well as a mermaid and a wolf, and the sharp dividing line between the two that can also blur. There're also the narrator's first person digressions and conversations, her wrestling with herself and her inner demons in dialogue and in open view. Before any of that, though, before even the first page of the novel proper with the promise of a mermaid and a wolf, Kiernan warns us that: This is the book it is, which means it may not be the book you expect it to be. Oddly enough, the warning's not so unexpected. After 2009's acclaimed and award nominated The Red Tree, Caitlin R. Kiernan's become the kind of writer with the reputation of doing the unexpected, the unexplainable, and the darkly, beautifully brilliant. The Drowning Girl shares some of that prior novel's techniques - its intertextuality and its particular style of first person narration, to give just two examples - but its results are quite different, abandoning the strong sense and confines of place that dominated The Red Tree, taking on a farther reaching and harder to pin down mantle, a story about need and change and our reality and our escaping it. When delving into something so multifaceted and amorphous, it's probably not a good idea to begin by admitting I don't understand the book I'm reviewing. But, as I seem to have done just that, I should explain what I mean. In an interview with Jeff VanderMeer at Weird Fiction Review, Kiernan said: "Over and over, I get the "But what happened?" people, and I think it causes me actual physical pain that they've so missed the point. Most of the time'-'and this is the truth'-'I don't know what happened! I don't want to know what happened! As I've said again and again, one good mystery is worth a thousand solutions." I don't think that The Drowning Girl is meant to be understood. It's meant to be experienced, of course, to be delved into and wrestled with, to creep into our psyche and twist and smash what it finds there, to make us think and feel - but not for something so simple and pat as understanding. Imp, as the main character's friends like to call her, is schizophrenic. This is not, though, solely a story about schizophrenia, containing insights only applicable to those afflicted. No, as Imp says: "There's always a siren, singing you to shipwreck. Some of us may be more susceptible than others are, but there's always a siren." (p. 101) Still, Imp's schizophrenia is vital to the tale, allowing and forcing her to face the mermaid, the werewolf, and the reality that binds us. Early on, she draws a sharp distinction between what is true and what is factual (p. 6), and so discerning what actually happened and what's impossible, what's real and what's fantastic, is wholly beside the point. The Drowning Girl is a narrative of thoughts and emotions, desires and implications, and not at all one of concrete occurrences. Separating true and factual, though, is a difficult thing, and Kiernan often mines the gap between them, spinning out inconsistencies that we and Imp can become mired in if we don't keep our thoughts on what really matters. Imp, too, can play the game. This is her story, as she types it out on her grandmother's typewriter, and the doubts and hesitations of Imp the Storyteller are right there alongside those of Imp the Character. The distinction between true and factual is a double edged sword, and, in the scenes that cut too deep, Imp often retreats into a barrage of dates and trivia and facts that obscures all possible truth. I won't be blowing your mind if I tell you that The Drowning Girl is a story here, but it doesn't stop there. This is a narrative of stories within stories, art within art, and layers folded tight and wrapping round their kin. Innumerable artists and writers, bits of legend and of history, are described, quoted, and alluded to within these pages. There's Phillip George Saltonstall and his haunting painting The Drowning Girl, Albert Perrault and his explorations ofviolence and the mythology of Little Red Riding Hood, Seich' Matsumoto and his suicide-invoking novel Kuroi Jukai, the grisly murder of Elizabeth Short that was later called The Black Dahlia Murder but first the Werewolf Murder, and even Imp's own stories and paintings. These mentions of and creations of real and unreal art are not hollow pretension. The clues are scattered in each of these sources, and the truth at The Drowning Girl's heart lies somewhere where all of this art meets and blends. Art, here, is a source of spreading ideas. And of spreading ghosts. "Hauntings are memes," Kiernan writes, "especially pernicious thought contagions, social contagions that need no viral or bacterial host and are transmitted in a thousand different ways. A book, a poem, a song, a bedtime story, ad grandmother's suicide, the choreography of a dance, a few frames of film, a diagnosis of schizophrenia, a deadly tumble from a horse, a faded photograph, or a story you tell your daughter. Or a painting hanging on the wall." (p. 12) And, of course, it doesn't end there. The Drowning Girl itself contains a haunting, and it seeks to spread itself beyond the 336 pages of its binding. It is an "infected document, just waiting to spread its load of plague." (p. 88) As all of this has no doubt made clear, Imp's story is not a straightforward one, and neither is its telling. Midway through the novel, Imp says: "I didn't set out to appease the Tyranny of Plot. Lives do not unfold in tidy plots." (p. 171) Imp is full of digressions, often advancing through the past by sliding from one isolated event to another in a path that will only make sense afterwards if it ever will. That our narrator is a character, a human and very much at the center of all the misery she must unfold, is never lost, and she skirts around the most difficult parts before darting back to confront them head on. At times, when the connections are particularly obscure and when the climax of the chapter or incident is held away for one approach too many, this approach can grow irritating. At others, the easy shattering of chronology unmoors the events of the story from their specifics, leaving them feeling timeless and all around us. The Drowning Girl is very much a work of Weird Fiction, that strange subgenre of horror and fantasy and more crystallized by H.P. Lovecraft (who Imp is "distantly related" to (p. 169)) that shows how the world is so much larger than what we see. It is not at all, though, a typical work of that genre. The world is vaster than we can grasp here, yes, greater than can be glimpsed through our "counterfeit sanity," (p. 285) and all the impossibility beyond may be damaging and deadly and potentially destructive, but characterizing it as simply malevolent is a hopeless oversimplification. Roles are reversed here, what's beyond the pall often being savaged by us and our world. It's not Elizabeth Short's murderers but the victim herself who is, in five stages, turned into a werewolf here, and its's not the siren but Imp who is the "author of abrasions" (p. 282) on that siren's perfectly soft skin. Imp remembers Eva Canning coming to her twice, once in July and once in November, once as a mermaid and once as a wolf. Only one of these recollections is true, but, not knowing which is, she has no choice but to tell both tales. These two appearances, of the siren and of the predator, of seduction and of violence, are often sharply differentiated in the novel, with memories of one eventually coming clear as a manufactured self defense mechanism against memories of the other. But, like most such dividing lines in the novel, the mermaid and the wolf, the women walking into the water and the women slain by claws, come together. "All these come down to changelings, don't they?" (p. 158) Imp writes, and so much of it does. The Drowning Girl is a novel about change, or at least the desire for it, a novel about mutability and collapsing boundaries, about "being held prisoner by flesh and wanting to be free so badly that death finally becomes an option." (p. 151) These transformations play into every part of the novel, from transsexuality to the wolf in a girl's skin, but it's the border of reality that's most frequently railed against, cowered behind, and penetrated. "Normal is a bitter pill that we rail against," (p. 65) Imp tells us, and insanity becomes a "siren" (p. 101), but things aren't that easy. Insanity and the supernatural is here countered with Imp's humanity, both in its greatest aspects and also in its least glamorous. "I pissed," she writes, "and so I knew I must be alive, because I don't think dead women piss, do they?" (p. 292) It's not, of course, limited to piss. Abalyn is Imp's girlfriend and lover, and the relationship between the two of them is one of the novel's strongest aspects. Their history together is meshed in with Imp's uncertainties about Eva and the world, but the two's interaction is rich with personality, hesitation, and, eventually, love. Besides which, showing Imp's vulnerabilities outside of the context of the purely impossible - showing how, after just meeting Abalyn, she "wanted her to say yes so badly I probably had my fingers crossed." (p. 19) - goes a long way towards humanizing Imp. Kiernan achieves all this with excellent prose that lives up to her reputation as a peerless wordsmith, but that's not to say that it, like the story, is exactly what you'd expect from her. The majority of the writing here is somewhat similar to that found in The Red Tree, at least insofar as it is as conversational as it is erudite, a mixture of insightful and vulnerable, traumatized and cutting. In marked contrast to the all out assault on every sense that defined so much of Kiernan's earlier prose, many of The Drowning Girl's descriptions and scenes read with the easy fluidity of dialogue, the unnatural rendered ethereal with suggestions and self examinations. All of that only adds to the impact of the barrage of images and emotions when it does come at the peaks of Imp's madness and the impossible's hold. The seventh chapter is the height of this, made up of pages of long paragraphs that snake and twist every which way and filled to the bursting and beyond with meaning and absolutely stunning writing, like: "Dead wolves are sin-eaters. She was nailed with iron spikes to a smokehouse wall and gawkers came from all around to bear witness to laid low Christ Wolf in her mock Calvary tribulations." (pp. 210-1) As I said in the beginning, I can't claim to fully understand The Drowning Girl. Then again, I'm not sure if such questions about sanity can ever be properly understood. I was, though, totally enthralled by this book. This is a novel about a haunting and about hauntings and about telling the stories of hauntings, and its characters and images, its words and power leave its page and haunt you as you read. But, though it hits you hard, The Drowning Girl is not a book of one note doom. It is a book about drowning, but it's also a book about learning to swim. [Note: originally posted at my blog, [...]]

• One of the best books I've read.

  I read a lot of books, and this is one of the best, the story is twisting, and confusing. Its a interesting, real look into madness, dark, gothic, utterly wonderful prose. Check it out.

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